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Today I had a very interesting conversation with my dentist (well, mostly he did the talking. Obviously). He was telling me about how he had started in a DMD/PhD program, but his university lost funding midway through. He could have tried funding himself, but as OMDG will tell you, that isn't always easy, so he bowed out of the PhD portion. He sounded like he was a little sad about it, but in general, everything turned out ok. Ultimately, what you want to do at 21 is not necessarily what you want to do at 31 or 41 or 51. This is probably the biggest thing driving me to pharmacy (as opposed to med school). I like the idea that I could work in industry for a while, and then settle in somewhere else later in life. Of course, this could be done as a physician, but from my perspective, there's a lot less flexibility, especially after your residency. Plus there's the debt factor- I would probably feel obligated to take the best job I could right away to start chopping down the loans. Theoretically, they would be much smaller as a PharmD. Pharmaceutical research is my interest anyway. At least for now.